When to Use Interactive Demos vs. Free Trial or Freemium Plans

When you think “PLG,” you probably think “free trial.”

It’s the whole idea behind product-led growth, right? Place your product at the forefront of acquiring customers, get higher engagement and conversion rates.

But free trials and freemium aren’t the only way to get potential users’ hands on your product.

Interactive demos offer a frictionless way for users to experience your product’s value — without the need for logins, configurations, or engineering resources.

So, when is it beneficial to use one or the other? Can you use both?

Below, we break down when to use each approach and how you can combine interactive demos with free trials or freemium plans to enhance your overall product-led growth strategy.

TL;DR

• Interactive demos are ideal when you lack engineering resources, have a complex product, and/or want to test out a PLG motion.
• Free trials work best for simple, intuitive products that users can easily explore on their own.
• Interactive demos can complement free trials or freemium plans by offering a guided product experience upfront that increases trial signups, reduces signup abandonment, and improves activation rates.

Interactive demos are a type of no-code sales demo software you can use to give prospects and customers a hands-on experience without them ever having to log into your SaaS product.

Technically, users aren’t actually using your product — they are just using a replica of it. But they still get a sense of what your product can do and whether it will serve their use case.

The goal of interactive demos is to arm potential buyers with the information and confidence they need to:

1. Make a purchase decision, and
2. Maximize the value of your product once they’ve converted.

Just like consumer products, SaaS products offer free trials to get potential customers to “try before they buy.”

To access a free trial, buyers hand over their email addresses and other personal details (sometimes their credit card numbers). In return, they get access to an account they are free to explore, typically for between 7 and 30 days.

The goal of a free trial is not only to expose users to a product’s UI, UX, and other key features. It’s also to cultivate a convincing and compelling enough experience that users commit to a paid plan.

And that’s the really hard part because free trial instances can be:

• So hands-off that users don’t know what to do and stop using the free trial.
• Tricky to set up, causing users to stall out before they experience an aha moment.
• Buggy, making users skeptical of actual value.

Both interactive demos and free trials can be valuable marketing tools. But interactive demos have an edge over free trials when:

1. You don’t have engineering resources

If you’re working at a company with limited engineering resources, your engineering team is busy working on your next release. And that means they probably don’t have much time to enhance — or even just maintain — your free trial instance.

If you’re working at a smaller company, these issues are compounded. It could be tough to get a free trial instance spun up at all.

Most interactive demo software, however, is entirely no code. Marketing, product, or growth can own the entire process, from ideation to publishing to upkeep.

2. You want to test going product-led

It can be risky to go all-in on a product-led strategy. What if you don’t get any free trial signups? What if your product isn’t as intuitive as you think?

A couple of rounds of testing could give you the confidence you need to adopt PLG. But, as we’ve mentioned, you may not have or want to dedicate the resources to building out a free trial yet.

Interactive demos can help you bridge that gap. Saad Khan, a GTM consultant, used Navattic interactive demos in cold prospecting while working at Vendr.

Saad Kahn: Cold prospecting with demos

“The idea was that before we commit to a PLG product internally, can we treat product tours as a ‘pre-PLG’ motion and outreach based on engagement and intent. My team hit 99% qualified pipe target and 111%.”

You can also use interactive demos to reactivate free trialers who dropped off. Per Saad:

“Interactive product tours were an unlock for me for stuck PLG pipeline and where folks would sign on to the product but would not progress to activation.”

3. Your product is complex

Complicated products tend to have a difficult onboarding process.

You need to connect to multiple integrations, provide sensitive information, and jump through a bunch of other hoops to see value.

Interactive demos don’t require any configuration.

Users can start clicking around in your product right away, seeing exactly how it would work post-onboarding (instead of getting frustrated with a lengthy setup).

Not surprisingly, the most popular industries we support at Navattic are fintech and cybersecurity — products that make it tough for free trials to be successful.

If your product is easy to get up and running quickly, it’s probably a good candidate for a free trial.

Slack and Notion, for example, are simple to set up and simple to use. It’s obvious in the first few hours of using those tools how they would benefit a working team.

If free trialers can understand your value prop within a few minutes of using your product, they’ll likely convert into paid users.

That said, even if your product is well-suited to a free trial, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from incorporating interactive demos into your GTM strategy or onboarding process. In fact, half of our customers at Navattic have some kind of PLG motion.

PLG vs Sales Led Distribution

Interactive demos can be an excellent complement to your free trial or freemium plan. Here’s how some of our customers (and our own team) leverage interactive demos in a PLG strategy:

1. Use them to get prospects interested in your free trial

Trainual, a knowledge transfer and training platform, was originally using a product video to draw in potential free trialers.

The problem with the video was that it wasn’t showing users what it felt like to be in the Trainual product.

As the team put it, “We wanted a way to showcase a curated and interactive version of our product. The goals were: 1) to get users to a light bulb moment before even starting a trial, and 2) to communicate value earlier in the evaluation process.”

In just a few weeks of publishing their first interactive demo, Trainual saw a:

• +450% lift in free trial signups when the interactive demo was displayed versus their original product tour video.
• +100% lift in users reaching activated trial status 7 days post-signup.
• +175% lift in users converting to paid customers in that same timeframe.

Hear more about Trainual’s story and how to drive pipeline with interactive demos on Chili Piper’s Demand Gen Chat.

2. Use them to increase free trial signups

Sibill is a platform that assists small businesses with cash flow management.

Originally, their Head of Growth, Federica Felicetti, gravitated toward Navattic interactive demos as a way to capture leads interested in trying out their product.

“Initially, we opted for a gated approach with our Navattic demos to boost our lead collection, especially at the onset of our journey,” she notes.

“Gated content seemed a viable strategy to gather more leads. However, we quickly realized that just collecting email addresses didn't sufficiently qualify leads for us, as we required more detailed information.”

So, they ran an A/B test — one version of their interactive demo remains gated, requiring an email to access it, while the other is completely ungated.

Try the Sibill demo here

The ungated version led to a 1.6x increase in free trial requests.

“It seemed that allowing prospects to view the demo without any barriers resulted in more sign-ups for the free trial compared to those who had already provided their email but didn’t proceed further in the funnel,” Federica says.

Learn more about why you’d use an interactive demo to push people toward a free trial on this episode of Behind the Experience.

3. Use them to reduce signup abandonment

It’s not uncommon for users to start signing up for a free trial or freemium, only to abandon the form a few minutes later.

Chainstack, a leading blockchain infrastructure platform, was experiencing this problem, seeing a significant drop off as soon as prospects hit their credit card paywall.

Pulkit Sachdeva, their Head of Growth, explains:

“The developers we sell to don't need much selling — they need assurance that our product delivers what it promises. There was discomfort in leaving payment info without seeing the product first.”

Animations or recorded videos could offer a Chainstack preview, but Pulkit wanted to offer prospects a more authentic experience of the product. So he built a Navattic tour.

“By doing some rough back-of-the-napkin math in Excel, I calculated the potential dollar return for every 1% of people we could re-engage through the demo,” Pulkit shared.

“The value was slightly more than the subscription cost with Navattic, which made it straightforward to secure approval for it.”

4. Use them in email drips to keep users engaged

When we launched our free Navattic plan last year, we wanted to make sure that users could make the most of it — a top-notch free experience could push folks into paid plans.

One way to help users maximize their use of Navattic was to pair the freemium plan with a drip campaign.

Navattic’s Growth Marketing Manager, Raman Khanna, built this email flow from scratch, focusing on four key areas:

• User activation, with ample guidance for publishing an interactive demo.
• Minimizing friction, by preemptively creating interactive demos to get users unstuck at common drop-off points (creating captures, publishing their demos).
• Driving upsells, by showing users the many ways they could use interactive demos (feature announcements, in-app demos, outbound sequences, etc.).
• User reactivation, by reminding users their plan existed, the benefits that came with their plan, and the many use cases for interactive demos.

Get his email templates and tips here.

Want to see how easy it is to create your first interactive demo? Create a Navattic account and find out.